| George Sexton 2005-05-18, 8:00 pm |
| MH Software, Inc. is pleased to announce the release of version 3.2.0 fo
Connect Daily. This is a major upgrade that adds several frequently asked
for features. Many of the additions in this release are designed to allow
us to add other features on our development list.
********************** New Features *********************************
A single day planner view has been added. The period displayed is
configurable. The tiny month calendars now navigate you to the day view.
If you want to see a good example, check out this actual customer site:
http://calendar.bigcanoehoa.org/ViewDay.html
An option has been added to prohibit overlapping events on the same
calendar.
An iCal import feature was added. This allows easily importing iCal files.
iCal files available on the internet include holidays for most countries,
liturgical calendars for the world's major religions, and schedules for
sports teams.
Printing appearance was greatly improved. In a lot of places, when you do
a print, the form controls and icons are now hidden. These changes were
done via CSS, using techniques we found in the book "The CSS Anthology -
101 Essential Tips, Tricks, & Hacks" by Rachel Andrew. If you are a
designer looking for some good information on CSS, we highly recommend
this book.
Changes were made to the HTML to make it validate cleanly. All calendar
views validate 100% cleanly using the w3.org HTML validator. This will
make it easier for designers to validate pages with Connect Daily.
Users can now set a preference for the default calendar view (Yearly,
Monthly, Weekly, Day, and List).
Many security related features were added to allow specification of
account lockout, password expiration period, etc. Upgrading to Connect
Daily 3.2.0 will use a more secure method of storing passwords. Some small
things were done to make it difficult to reverse engineer and perform a
dictionary attack.
************************** Bug Fixes *************************************
Several small bugs were fixed. For complete details, refer to the change
log at:
http://www.mhsoftware.com/changelog.html
********************** Upgrading *****************************************
Hosted Customers
We will be putting this version in production on the weekend of the 28th
of May. You may want to remind yourself to check the appearance because we
will be adding some new elements to the style sheet.
Non-Hosted Customers Upgrading
If you currently have a maintenance agreement in place for Connect Daily,
you can download and install the new version. To check when your upgrade
support expires, from the menu Choose SYSTEM | CONFIGURATION. The UPDATE
EXPIRATION DATE value shown on the CALENDAR LICENSE SCREEN determines if
you can upgrade to this build. If the date shown is already passed, you
will need to purchase an upgrade to the newest version of Connect Daily.
******************** Future Directions for 3.2 *******************
The following features will be worked on as part of the 3.2 series:
Documentation - We have a lot of good documentation scattered around in
the application, the manual, and our FAQ. We'll be looking at creating a
unified documentation package that will combined all of our reference
material in to one hopefully easier to use reference.
We will be looking at adding mysql support. The current beta version of
MySQL adds features needed by Connect Daily.
A system configuration option will be added to specify that the tiny month
calendars in year view, week view, and day view will have a slightly
different appearance on days that have events. A lot of customers using
Connect Daily have events every day, so this feature won't be for
everyone.
The holiday add screen will be re-written to use iCal files so that we can
specify different holiday files for different countries, along with
specification of Liturgical Calendars for various religious communities.
We will be working on a bi-directional synchronization program for Connect
Daily. This will allow users of MS Outlook to create an event in MS
Outlook, and have it transparently be added to the Connect Daily calendar.
We are going to do additional work on the printing appearance.
Unfortunately, for customers to take advantage of this will require
re-writing their existing style sheet using the new Connect Daily style
sheet.
**************** Future Directions for post 3.2 series ******************
The next major release of Connect Daily will drop support for some older
technologies. Specifically:
Servlet API 2.2 will no longer be supported. Considering the 2.3
specification was released in 2001, this shouldn't be a problem now.
Support for JDK 1.2 and 1.3 will be dropped. The 1.4 series, released in
March of 2002 is stable, and has many worthwhile features.
Oracle 8 support will be dropped. Oracle has dropped support for this
product.
It is unlikely that we will be supporting Palm Desktop for future versions
of Connect Daily. We're trying to work with Palm to get some support from
them, but it is difficult.
--
George Sexton
MH Software, Inc. - Home of Connect Daily Web Calendar
http://www.mhsoftware.com/conectdaily.htm
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